Ed Pinsent:
About Mia Zabelka
(Federal Ministryfor Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport,catalogue: Austrian Art Prize in the category „Music“, 2021)
“I first heard the music of Mia Zabelka on her 2011 album for Monotype, simply titled M, and was very impressed by her unique performing style, her sound, her use of electronics…by that time she was already well established as a player, but at least I managed to notice some aspects of her work – the use of voice, the use of electronic aids to extendher reach, the Pauline Oliveros connection…there was also a deep connection between the human body and music, which she was busy exploring in a process she is calling ‘automatic playing’.
She seemed more like a very physical performance artist than an ordinary improvising violinist. Then there was that cover photograph, a picture taken by Ulrike Sulzenbacher. Mia is pictured with her mouth open wide, her eyes closed, wrapped in concentration with the music…her whole body appeared to be convulsed, as if galvanised by an electric current. Her hands looked uncanny, with a mind of their own, as if human flesh were transforming itself into an instrument, stretching to wrap around the violin like tendrils. As I wrote about a later performance,
“It’s as though there’s so much information she needs to convey that she has to work twice as hard just to cram it into the available space…her fingers, arms (whole upper body) go ever so slightly crazy with her efforts.”
M would become a key release for me personally, containing clues to the entirety of her work. She had a classical training and an academic background, but from her earliest recorded statements it’s clear she was already developing her own personal ideas and breaking away from convention. Somateme was released in 1987 on the Edition RZ label, a German imprint showcasing important contemporary classical avant-garde work; an excerpt from Somateme also appeared on the Österreichische Musik Der Gegenwart series, a survey of electro-acoustic activities across Europe.
These hints suggest that Mia might have taken a more formal compositional pathway, but instead she listened to her own inner inspiration. Somateme can certainly be read as electro-acoustic composition, with its use of tapes, editing, and ingenious blending with performed music; but I think what’s relevant is the statement about the human body, and its connection to music production. The piececontains the sound of the human heartbeat (her own) and breathing; she applied contact microphones to her own skin. The violin playing melds completely with these bold musique concrète experiments. Somateme was a collaborative piece – Giselher Smekal assisted with the tapes, and Robert Bilek played improvising saxophone, but right from the start we have this exploration of the human body, asking questions about its place in the process of music creation. The questions weren’t fully answered in 1987, but one part of the journey had started.
Later works developed this notion of the body and its connection with the violin; she formed and grew this connection through her own method of holding and playing the instrument. Physical impulses in the body transform themselves into sounds. She wants to cultivate a process where everything is “filtered through the body”; gestures change movement into musical language. The relationships between body, gesture, space and sound are something she has been exploring for years. You need only watch a video of her performing to see it for yourself; it’s not just arm and hand movements, but her whole body shakes, contorts, making sudden jerking movements, bending sharply at the waist, as if to coax the music forth.
The voice participates in this process too, urging the sound out. And you can hear it on Monday Sessions, a set of live concert pieces from 2015, acoustic violin and voice offering the pure “uncut” experience. We could mention the virtuoso techniques, the very varied sound production across these concise tracks, the exciting way noise competes with melody, and the uncanny voice elements indicating an inner emotional writhing. Ken Waxman noted how “each track illustrates a different string-trope” and compared her to a medium talking with the dead.
Indeed one piece is called ‘Streams Of Consciousness’, suggesting a creative trance-state. You could, I suppose, call all of this evidence of “extended technique”, but I believe it’s something deeper than that. “Extended technique” is a term that’s been adopted by modern musicians, especially improvisers, for about the last 20 years, and they use it to refer to a very refined and unique method of playing their instrument, often resulting in pinched, minimal sounds, as if they hardly dared move a muscle outside of their self-imposed straightjacket, for fear of compromising the purity of their technique. Zabelka, conversely, has embarked on a much more natural and expressive way of playing; to use the words of many a psycho-babbling personal fitness trainer, she “listens to her body”.
Only Keiji Haino springs to mind as another musician who has put significant effort into contorting his body into wild shapes, in order to reinvent electric-guitar playing on his own terms; he knew he couldn’t get where he needed to be by merely practising musical scales. Central to Mia’s body-as-instrument notion is the 2007 work Embodiment, realised with Pauline Oliveros; it’s there in the title, and the way that Oliveros connected to everything (friends, musicians, the landscape, the environment) through the simple acts of listening and breathing.
Through her process, Mia’s violin starts to become a resonator. She enhances that resonating aspect with use of electronic effects, and while that transformation is good, it’s not simply about creating an unusual noise for its own sake – although the untamed noise of 2017’s Cellular Resonance has evidently proven popular with many listeners, who might mistake it at first for a very extreme instance of Stoner or Doom Rock, a droning noise that puts Sunn O))) in their place. With her E-violin and guitar distortion effects, Mia turns in a noisy blaster with production assist from Lydia Lunch (who also worked on Medusa’s Bed from 2013). I think Lunch’s personality brings out the “visceral” side of Zabelka in this collaborative effort. This powerful resonating action is something Zabelka has learned to expand, to reproduce on a grander scale…
Mia has explicitly stated she is trying to evolve her own personal musical language, and it’s important that it must be shared, allowing collaboration with others. This is quite some way from the more formalised academic pathway that modern music has followed since the onset of serialism in the 20th century, the quest to develop a language based on rigid sets of rules and formulae about intervals, harmonics, and tone rows (all of which, ironically, tend to restrict freedom).
Instead, Mia has followed a more intuitive and natural direction. It’s becoming a very specific means of expression and unique to her, yet she still finds common ground with collaborators, which has led to her embrace of many musical genres and crossovers. No lines are drawn. Refusing to junk her classical background, she freely uses melody and harmony. She knows also that free improvisers have their own language, their own coded sets of responses and behaviours, but I believe she’s finding a way to open that up too. Mia wants to reach deep emotions; through improvising, especially with its real-time responses and quick decisions, she stands a chance of building on her own language, such that it is free of conventional musical clichés. A new musical language, shareable, expressive, that offers a way of bypassing stereotyped thought; how many artists have achieved that?
…At the same time, Mia has hinted at notions familiar to us from the worlds of science fiction. She applies the term ‘automatic playing’ in this context, describing a specific relationship with technology, the body as an interface. To use her own expression, it is
“not only a computer-like mechanical playing style, but rather the ability to achieve the production of a flow of sound similar to that in speech.”
All of this is quite different to the mechanistic and heavy-handed statements of the performance artist Stelarc; Mia does not regard science and technology as invasive threats to the human race, but instead perceives an agency that can help us find our way to new modes of expression. Further, she is not given to dreaming about fantastic travels into outer space, but is an artist very much connected to the modern world, and attuned to the environment.
If you believe, as I do, that music is central to mankind’s health and happiness and spirit, then you will welcome Mia’s message and will want to join her in her benign mission. It’s a tremendous result that her unique position has been recognised by the award of the Austrian Art Prize this year.”
Ed Pinsent is a writer and comics artist living in London. He self-published 25 print issues of The Sound Projector since 1996, has broadcast a weekly radio show of experimental music for Resonance FM since 2004, and maintains a blog / website for record reviews. He has produced published annotations for the work of Anton Nikkila, Mark Vernon, Edward Ruchalski, Rhodri Davies, Angharad Davies, Toshimaru Nakamura, and others. His music journalism has also been published in The Wire and Resonance magazine.